Saturday, August 24, 2013

My very first pistol was a cap and ball Colt Shoot as fast as lightnin' but it loads a mite slow Loads a mite slow and soon I found out It can get you into trouble but it can't get you out Then I went and bought myself a Colt 45 Called a peacemaker but I never knew why Never knew why, I didn't understand Cause Mama said the pistol is the devil's right hand

The group points out that Starbucks has taken a stand on other issues -- particularly in banning smoking in front of stores -- and believes the company should now come out against guns.

“Starbucks calls themselves a progressive company but by not taking a stand on guns, they’ve become a rallying place for ‘open carry’ supporters," Shannon Watts, the organization’s founder, told The Huffington Post. The organization has named the boycott “Skip Starbucks Saturday" and plans on making it a regular event.

Local Fox NewsThe mother of an accidental shooting victim wants authorities to file additional charges connected to her son's death. A juvenile court judge sentenced Levi Reed to one year of probation Friday for the July, 2012 shooting death of his friend, Noah McGuire. Reed, 15, pleaded guilty to reckless homicide last month, and stated that he did not know a gun he had found in a bedroom in his grandparent’s home was loaded before he shot McGuire, 14, in the chest. McGuire was spending the night at the home when he was killed. McGuire's mother, Judi Sandoval, does not believe Reed should have been charged in her son's death. Instead, she wants the gun's adult owner to be held responsible. "He's a good boy. He's a good boy and I hate to see him mixed up in the criminal justice system," Sandoval said of Reed. "I'm angry an adult has never been charged. Columbus police have failed to do that." No additional arrests will be made in connection with case, according to prosecutors.

Friday, August 23, 2013

--(Ammoland.com)- “I will never buy an ankle holster,” I said to myself. “How impractical is that? You can’t access your back-up all that quickly.

You have to bend down or forward to reach it. It might not even fit my pants.

Do people actually use them in real life, or is that all in the movies?”

Most of us reading this open carry our firearms on a regular basis. But do we carry a back-up gun (BUG)? There is a saying, “one is none, two is one,” meaning one should always carry a back-up in case something happens to your primary weapon. Do you carry a BUG? If you do, you have another choice to make. You’ve already taken great care in choosing your primary sidearm and holster, but what about your back-up?

A Dunkin' Donuts employee in Lauderhill, Fla. was beaten and pistol-whipped Tuesday for delivering the wrong kind of coffee to a customer, and the ugly incident was caught on camera.

The employee accidentally gave drive-thru customer Alexis Longo an iced caramel coffee instead of the iced vanilla coffee she ordered, reports the Miami Herald. Longo parked her car in the parking lot to tell the employee about the wrong order, and when he realized his mistake, he asked Longo what he could do to re-make her drink properly.

That's when things started to escalate. Rajay Hall, the Dunkin' Donuts employee, came forward to NBC Miami to talk about the assault.

"The girl came in. She was getting upset," said Hall in the video above. "She was screaming at me, just like cursing at me." Hall pleaded with her to let him make it right.

"I made a mistake, I'll do everything I can to fill that mistake," he said. "I asked them, 'What do they want in the coffee?' She was like, 'I don't know, just make back the coffee.'"

Longo allegedly tried to hit Hall, but her husband Jeffrey Wright intervened and allegedly assaulted him instead. A security camera in the store captured the entire altercation, which started with punching and escalated to Wright beating Hall with a gun.

The owner of a gun shop that legally sold a rifle to the Connecticut school shooter’s mother has pleaded guilty to unrelated federal firearms violations.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Thursday 56-year-old David Laguercia pleaded guilty to transfer of a firearm before completing a background check and failure to maintain firearms records. Prosecutors say an investigation found about 300 examples of false or misleading information in Riverview Gun Sales records.

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was sentenced Wednesday to 35 years in prison for giving hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in one of the nation’s biggest leak cases since the Pentagon Papers more than a generation ago.

Flanked by his lawyers, Manning, 25, stood at attention and appeared not to react when military judge Col. Denise Lind announced the punishment during a brief hearing. Among the spectators, there was a gasp, and one woman put her hands up, covering her face.

“I’m shocked. I did not think she would do that,” said Manning supporter Jim Holland, of San Diego. “Thirty-five years, my Lord.”

The former intelligence analyst was found guilty last month of 20 crimes, including six violations of the Espionage Act, as part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on media leaks.

Officials say a gun went off inside a kindergartener's backpack in a Memphis school cafeteria, though no one was hurt.

A news release from the Shelby County school district Thursday says the gun went off inside the student's backpack in the cafeteria of Westside Elementary School. School staffers immediately took control of the backpack.

The school system says there was no evidence of harmful intent. However, the school has a zero-tolerance policy against guns.

School security officers and the Memphis Police Department responded quickly, and the child was taken into custody.

"The child was taken into custody." Now that's the way to do it. Maybe the kid should be tried as an adult, as long as we don't arrest the gun owner and hold him accountable.

Michael Brandon Hill, who according to officials entered Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., with an AK-47 assault-style rifle and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition, does not have a biological mother after his own died.

The threat was on Dec. 30 or Dec. 31, just two weeks after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which left 26 people dead, 20 of whom were children.

A grand jury charged Hill in March with making terroristic threats for the incident, to which he pleaded guilty. He received three years of probation and was ordered to be evaluated and treated for anger management. In addition, Timothy Hill said his brother was issued a no-contact order, and said the two have not talked recently.

Hill is "someone who slipped through the cracks," Timothy said, describing his brother as someone who started "having problems" at age 13.

"He had his good times, and then he had his bad times," Timothy said. "He was bipolar and suffered from ADD [attention deficit disorder]."

Knotts also said that Hill's issues included being “diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, and other mental issues.”

Hill is charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, making terroristic threats and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon for Tuesday's shooting. He was questioned for hours by police, but police have no clear idea of what may be a motive or whether Hill has ties to the school.Authorities said Wednesday that Hill did not own the AK-47-like weapon that was used in the shooting, and that they believed it was taken from the house of an acquaintance of his. Authorities believe that the gun was originally purchased from a licensed dealer and said they were working to locate the gun’s owner, but did not specify whether the weapon was stolen.

Cathy Schmelzer couldn’t believe it when she read in the newspaper that Terry J. Dunlap Sr. — a firearms instructor — had accidentally shot someone.

“Oh no, he’s done it again!” she said she thought to herself. Schmelzer, 50, was with Cathy Hessler, a 14-year-old Pickerington girl, when she was accidentally shot in 1977 by Dunlap during a Halloween hayride.

At the time, Dunlap was a Pickerington police department auxiliary lieutenant. According to a Dispatch account back then, Dunlap said he had fired his .38-caliber handgun into the air to create, in his words, a “scary effect” while taking his daughter and her friends for a “haunted hayride” on his rural property in Fairfield County.

Dunlap said he thought the gun was loaded with blanks. But a bullet ricocheted and hit Cathy Hessler in her right leg. The bullet was removed at Mount Carmel East hospital.

No criminal or departmental actions were taken against Dunlap because the shooting was deemed accidental.

A good strong one-strike-you're-out policy would have disarmed this irresponsible man decades ago. People who do reckless and dangerous things with guns should never have the chance to repeat the offense. I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Dunlop hasn't had a good list of incidents in his long career which could have all been avoided.

National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre baselessly warned that proponents of stronger gun laws could implement a firearm "confiscation scheme" in his latest unhinged column for The Daily Caller.

Despite LaPierre's warnings of a draconian gun registration and confiscation scheme that he wrote "could happen to us if we fail to stand and fight," the plot LaPierre described is illegal under current federal law, has not been proposed by the supporters of stronger gun laws LaPierre singled out in his column, and would likely violate the United States Constitution.

LaPierre's column was published on August 19, the day before BuzzFeed reported that the NRA itself uses a variety of data collection methods to gather information on gun owners. In an article that described myriad ways the NRA collects data on gun owners, BuzzFeed contributor Steve Friess noted the tension between the NRA's warnings about government gun owner databases and the gun rights organization's own actions:

The National Rifle Association has rallied gun owners -- and raised tens of millions of dollars -- campaigning against the threat of a national database of firearms or their owners.

But in fact, the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself. The country's largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful lobby's secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy.

That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines, and more, BuzzFeed has learned.

LaPierre's Daily Caller column is demonstrative of the outlandish gun registration and confiscation plots the NRA warns of while apparently simultaneously collecting information on gun owners for its own purposes.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

While the National Rifle Association publicly fights against a
national gun registry, the organization has gone to incredible lengths
to compile information on “tens of millions” of gun owners — without
their consent.

But in fact, the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of
already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the
knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices
of the NRA itself. The country’s largest privately held database of
current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful
lobby’s secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its
estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy.

That
database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit
registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new
owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified
instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers
to gun magazines and other sources.

But, given the type of things gun nuts say, I can see how they might be willing to say that's just a distraction from the meat of the subject: no matter how strong the evidence that's just plain WRONG.

Anyway, this picture is making its rounds on the internet with people wondering if this is real or a sick joke. Of course, given the amount of gun violence in the US, that is a good question. The gun looks fake, but lots of fake guns can look pretty real.

So, where are the truly responsible gun owners? I've been wanting to write about the "pro-gun" crowd being a better argument for strict gun control. Of course, deep down they want to see more guns and more people walking around with guns--even if they are total morons.

But, what better argument is there for serious restrictions on firearm ownership when guns are so much a part of the culture and people want to see them everywhere that we end up with pictures like this? :

Isn't this the logical outcome of all the wanting to see guns everywhere?

I hope you feel really good about yourselves and feel smug about how good you are with your guns.

Anyway, More info on the pic here: http://nolongervictimsblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/nolonger-victims-urgent-help-needed-child-abuse/

Question: What do the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union have in common?

Answer: The determination to stop New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg from having his way with guns.

The NRA defends the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. The ACLU defends the Fourth Amendment’s constraints on “stop and frisk.” Between the two, guns will remain on the street and more people will die.

The numbers are irrefutable. Last year, 419 New Yorkers were murdered, mostly by gunfire. In 1992, the figure was 1,995.

That works out to about four New Yorkers a day who were not killed by guns. Yes, crime has fallen across America, but nowhere has the drop approached New York City’s. Some of that is due to whiz-bang policing, computers and all that jazz.

But some of it is due to stop-and-frisk. There are simply fewer guns on the street. (The New York Police Department estimates that in 1993, “as many as 2 million illegal guns were in circulation in New York City,” many of them imported from Virginia.)

Rightly or wrongly — a higher court will ultimately decide — the city’s stop-and-frisk program has collided with the Fourth Amendment’s injunction against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin has ruled that the program is racial profiling at its most pernicious, and that, too, is illegal. After all, of an incredible 4.4 million stops, an overwhelming number were of black or Hispanic men — and resulted in relatively few arrests. It did not seem to matter to the judge that an equally overwhelming number of both assailants and victims were also black and Hispanic men. Her gavel came down. The city was guilty.

It may well be. The issue before the court was not the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk but constitutionality.

Bloomberg has failed to appreciate the political dimension of what he was attempting. The conservative culture adores guns, and the liberal culture of a city that has grown accustomed to a low crime rate endorses a simplistic notion of racism.

Both sides have, so to speak, stuck to their guns — and as a result, more people will die.

The National Rifle Association has rallied gun-owners — and raised tens of millions of dollars — campaigning against the threat of a national database of firearms or their owners.

But in fact, the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself. The country’s largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful lobby’s secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy.

That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines and more, BuzzFeed has learned.

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam declined to discuss the group’s name-gathering methods or what it does with its vast pool of data about millions of non-member gun owners. Asked what becomes of the class rosters for safety classes when instructors turn them in, he replied: “That’s not any of your business.”

The vast size of the NRA’s database and its sophisticated methods of analyzing the public mood go a long way to explaining the organization’s enduring influence. Even in an age when opinion polls show gun-control measures gaining in general popularity and when wealthy benefactors like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg are spending millions to counter the NRA’s lobbying and advertising budgets, the NRA has built-in advantages.

The NRA won’t say how many names and what other personal information is in its database, but former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman estimates they keep tabs on “tens of millions of people.”

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

"At one point during the George Zimmerman murder trial, the prosecution attempted to reenact the shooting in the courtroom, but it was nothing like this. A new PSA from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence uses audio from the 911 calls made that night in Sanford, Florida to recreate the scene as no one has before."

A tragic accident occurred in a small Michigan town Sunday when a 3-year-old boy died after shooting himself in the head.

According to the Associated Press, the child, identified as Damon Holbrook, picked up a loaded gun belonging to a man staying in his home in Dundee near the Ohio border. The man, reportedly a friend of the boy’s father, had allegedly left the gun on the floor of a bedroom closet after returning home from work.

Sgt. Tom Redmond told local Fox affiliate WJBK-TV that the man, whose name has not been released, had a pistol license.

Witnesses told police the victim, Joseph Steele, 28, had been hunting with family members in a wooded area just south of his home.

"Witnesses stated they had split up and at some point had lost sight of the victim. One of the hunters fired at a distance at what he perceived to be a squirrel. Moments later, the victim yelled out that he'd been shot," Howard County sheriff's Capt. Greg Hargrove said in a news release.

Steele was shot in the chest, but he was able to talk with witnesses before he lost consciousness. Witnesses treated him at the scene and waited for paramedics to arrive.

"Family members and witnesses are cooperating with investigators as they piece together the events leading up to this tragic shooting," Hargrove said.

Dispatchers walked her through first aid for the wound until EMS crews arrived. He was then flown to a Wichita hospital in critical condition.

He gave a statement saying the shooting was accidental, too.

But after detectives talked to the couple's four children, who were home at the time, and neighbors, they said that wasn't quite the case.

Sheriff Kelly Herzet tells Eyewitness News that according to witnesses, the couple was in a heated argument over the children when Brooke Longobardi pulled out a gun and fired it several times. He says she hit her husband in the back in the upper left shoulder once.

Deputies are now holding her on aggravated battery charges while the investigation continues. The couple's four children, ages four to 13, are staying with family members.

Faculty at Los Angeles Community College (LACC) have canceled a longstanding National Rifle Association (NRA) class thanks to new restrictions laid down by the school’s board of trustees.

The new regulations, which apply to all nine campuses of the LACC system, will begin this year, and ban all firearms, including those that are “non-operational and in the instructional setting” from school grounds.

The rules make an exception for “non-operational” weapons used in “theatrical performances,” but not for the non-credit firearms class which the school has offered in conjunction with the NRA for the last six years.

Board of Trustees Vice President Scott Svonkin, author the resolution that ushered in the new rules, told Campus Reform last Monday he believes school’s have no place teaching students how to use guns —but that its educators and faculty do have a responsibility to “promote gun control.”

It brings up an interesting question. Does education about guns promote the use of guns?

Monday, August 19, 2013

This slide show relates to climate change, but it pretty much applies to almost everything that the right wants to promote from smoking to gun control.

For example, it was pretty much accepted that the Second Amendment applied only to Article I, Section 8, clause 16 Militias until fairly recently, but there is now "new scholarship" that challenges that interpretation which is funded by the NRA. Note who the speaker was at that conference! Of course, he should have recused himself from the case for bias--it might even be an ethics violation for him.

But, as this suggests, you need to do some thinking for yourself, which most people are adverse.

Besides, the myth is far more comforting.

But, if you have doubt, then you need to do your own research to try and find the truth. My suggestion is to go to primary sources--not Second Amendment "Scholars".

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a gun-control measure into law on Sunday that expands background checks to cover all firearms purchases in the state, closing what he said was a loophole that exempted gun sales between private parties.

The new law also requires all gun owners to report any lost or stolen firearms to local police within 72 hours.

"Guns are a plague on too many of our communities," Quinn, a Democrat, said in a statement. "Making sure guns do not fall into the wrong hands is critical to keeping the people of Illinois safe. This commonsense law will help our law enforcement crack down on crime and make our streets safer."

Michael Henry, the straw purchaser of the gun used to kill Plymouth police Officer Brad Fox, is led into the courtroom for his sentencing in Montgomery County Courthouse Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013. Photo by Gene WalshLocal news reportsDuring an emotion-filled hearing punctuated by tears and grief from the widow and comrades of slain Plymouth police Officer Bradley Fox, a Philadelphia man learned his fate for providing a gun to the Lower Merion man who used it to kill Fox.

Michael Joseph Henry, 31, of the 900 block of North 41st Street, was sentenced in Montgomery County Court on Thursday to 20to66 years in a state correctional facility for selling nine guns, including a Beretta pistol, to convicted felon Andrew Charles Thomas, who used the Beretta to fatally shoot Fox last Sept. 13.

“This defendant is supplying guns to someone who is suicidal and who he thinks is paranoid and he’s arming him to the teeth. I find that to be an aggravating factor,” said Judge Joseph A. Smyth, explaining his reasons for imposing some maximum penalties against Henry. “He placed these guns into the underground market which is usually frequented by criminals.”Henry, prosecutors said, made “straw purchases” of nine firearms, seven pistols and two rifles, at gun stores in West Norriton, Montgomery County, and East Pikeland, Chester County, between April and July 2012. Henry then illegally transferred the nine weapons, in exchange for $500 each, to Thomas, 44, of Grasmere Road, Lower Merion.